YOTA launched the Africa Youth Partnership in 2022 with a focus on advocating a youth-inclusive and equitable recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Funded by the Ford Foundation, the first phase of the project was implemented in partnership with Restless Development as a sub-grantee in charge of the eastern and southern African countries.

The initiative escalated youth action for an equitable recovery across Africa, with a focus on ten deep dive countries, namely Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In these countries, we have established Youth Task Teams, which produced collective reviews and evidence of the performance of national and regional COVID-19 recovery programmes.

Each Youth Task Team followed an extensive process of identifying their accountability focus, mapping their accountability ecosystem, consolidating their accountability action teams, and establishing a set of indicators for their work. This enabled them to gather and analyse mainly secondary data from responsible departments and agencies. They then used the findings to create various knowledge products – 10 policy briefs (in all 10 participating countries), a joint communiqué (by Gambia, Ghana, Liberia and Nigeria), a policy statement (Zimbabwe), 3 petitions (Ghana, Uganda and Zimbabwe). These knowledge products and statements have served as a vehicle for disseminating the youth position on critical recovery issues in order to assist policymakers in making informed decisions.

We have also convened more than 1,300 young innovators who are deploying the human-centred design to create 1,000 innovative solutions in education, health, vaccine equity and other aspects of the continental recovery agenda.

Thanks to further funding from the Ford Foundation, the second phase of the Africa Youth Partnership is focused on effective youth engagement in the international system of action against climate change. The work under this phase includes flagship knowledge resources for meaningful youth participation in international meetings and creating a youth delegate program. It also includes a dedicated online resource hub comprising, ongoing learning sessions, and supporting youth representation in regional and global climate engagements.